Data centers are a collection of secure, fault-resistant resources that are accessed by users over a communications network (e.g., a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet). By way of example only, the resources of a data center may comprise servers, storage, switches, routers, and/or modems. Data centers may, for example, provide support for corporate websites and services, web hosting companies, telephony service providers, internet service providers, or application service providers.
Data centers carry out tasks that must be executed on a continuous basis as well as tasks that may be queued and executed periodically. Tasks amenable to periodic execution, such as batch processing tasks, include for example, backups, indexing, media encoding, data mining, and the like.
Considerable operating costs, such as electricity/power costs are associated with running data centers. Accordingly, a data center management system that minimizes power costs is desirable.